Composer Liang Lei (Photo by Ron Jones)
Published: February 17, 2013
BEIJING — Liang Lei, the Chinese-born composer known for his visionary and explorative compositions, had one of his earliest pieces played in China for the first time this year. “Dialectal Percussions,” which takes its inspiration from the local Beijing dialect (also known as Beijinghua), was composed in 1994, but was heard by a Beijing audience for the first time this January at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.
The Rome Prize and Aaron Copland Award-winner, who now lives permanently in America, spoke to ARTINFO about operating in a globalized music scene, his cultural heritage and what it was like growing up amongst his generation of composers.
You wrote this piece when you were 22. What about “Dialectal Percussions” marks it as emerging from this point in your life and career?
My sense of home-seeking was becoming more and more acute. I left Beijing when I was 17. Around the time I composed this piece, I was listening to a lot of cassette tapes of Peking Opera and Xiangsheng (a kind of Chinese stand-up comedy that makes use of puns and allusions, also known as Cross-talk).
Perhaps that was a way for me to relive my memories of Beijing. Only after I left China, did I start to miss Beijing so much. Growing up there, I used to dislike the Beijing dialect, thinking it too unfriendly to outsiders.
But when I discovered some old recordings of Hou Baolin's Xiangsheng (Hou Baolin, who died in 1993, was one of China’s most illustrious Xiangsheng performers), I started to feel the warmth of the dialect radiating through time. I fell in love with these sounds again and started appreciating their dramatic delivery and musicality. Along with Peking Opera [performances] by Mei Lanfang, this was a way of home-seeking.
What was it about the dialect that attracted you?
I was mesmerized by its dramatic effects in intonation, rhythmic articulation, and musical expressivity. Some of the materials are from Beijinghua, some from Peking Opera. I extracted those moments that were particularly attractive, and isolated them in my composition. Using music, I framed these moments with silences, as if I was using a magnifying glass to look at the details of this language in slow motion.
You have been commended for being truly cross-cultural in your compositions. Is this aspect of your music important to you?
What is important for me is to avoid using Chinese references as labels or national flags in the music. Whether it is Chinese, American or European doesn't matter at all, provided it is interesting.
The reason is that I think it is easier to provoke reactions by using cultural labels — but these labels are, more often than not, crude generalizations and misleading simplifications. It is more challenging and rewarding artistically to penetrate those juxtapositions, and to create works that are real hybrids both musically and aesthetically.
What marks out your generation of musicians from your forefathers?
It is hard to speak for my generation, so I can only try to speak for myself. My predecessors have an enormous influence on me. But our age, and the intellectual, technological, and cultural resources are vastly different from what they were 20 years ago.
When I left China 23 years ago, the country had just started on its path to today's prosperity. Until then, I had never visited an open-shelf library in China. When I was in college in the US, the best way for me to study the Buddhist scriptures or Chinese literary treatises was by borrowing books from the Yenching Library at Harvard and hand-copying them.
Today, I still think that is the best way to learn, but at the same time, all of these resources are easily available on the internet. We live in a global age with almost immediate access to unlimited resources. This only makes me realize that I cannot satisfy myself by using cultural labels to communicate with my audience — they deserve better.
They have seen much more of the world than they would have done 20 years ago, so these labels are hardly exotic anymore. Today's audience is more sophisticated and deserves musical dialogues that are more in depth and meaningful, which generate truly new and innovative experiences.
“Dialectal Percussions” is for the following percussion instruments: the temple bell, 5tempbl, tam-t, tom-t, bng, b.d, xiao luo or small gongs, da luo or big gongs, two xiao bo or small cymbals, and peng zhong or Buddhist chanting bells (a pair).
Originally posted in Artinfo China
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